To stay in the global race, British universities may have to go private.

The Claw Fountain at Stanford is surrounded by the names of donors. They have been a better friend to American universities than government has to British ones.

If the devil were to conduct an experiment into mankind’s ability to resist temptation, it would look something like Stanford University. It is built in one of the world’s most agreeable climates and everyone dresses as if they have just stepped off the beach – which lies only half an hour away. Hammocks lie between trees, as if to tempt the weak-willed on their way to lectures. There are jazz clubs, golf courses and swimming pools – and 1,700 students are added each year, to see if they get any work done. But they do, enough to make Stanford one of the world’s best universities. In fact, 22 of the top 30 are American – and its universities are pulling way ahead of Britain in the world intellectual league tables. A big part of the reason is that America’s best unis are private, whereas ours are run in effect as part of a government higher education service. I look at this in my Telegraph column today.

I was at Stanford last week, on a Media Fellowship from the Hoover Institute. The quality of research there is extraordinary, and far more diverse than you will find in British academia. But what struck me most was the racial mix of the students. Just over a third of its undergraduates are white (vs two-thirds of Americans). Asians are the biggest minority, then Hispanics. When a Brit thinks of American universities, we tend to think $40,000 tuition fees – but in fact private Stanford has a formula of social mobility that should shame Britain’s would-be social engineers. Its needs-blind formula grants spaces to the brightest, and then subsidises those who need it.

Just over half of Stanford students receive subsidy, and the average grant more than covers the fees. To me, this is fairer that the British system. It costs £16k to educate someone at Oxford and Cambridge. Why shouldn’t the kids pay it, especially if they have just come from schools that charge £30k? Let theose who can afford it pay the full costs of their tuition, and let those who can’t be subsidised. The American “needs-blind” system is, in my view, way fairer than the British system.

So private American universities do social justice better than the government. Stanford has worked out a formula: it goes out of its way to find bright kids from poor backgrounds. It educates them well, even . They donate generously, and if they become rich then they give as freely as they receive. Stanford raised $1 billion last year, almost twice as much as Oxford and Cambridge combined. This ‘affirmative meritocracy’ does not dilute its academic rigour: most of its departments are in the top five in the world. Stanford actually delivers the social mobility that Britain’s state-run system fails to achieve.

Google is a product of Stanford but so is Julian Castro (below), the 38-year-old Mayor of San Antonio who addressed the Democratic National Congress recently. He credits Stanford’s needs-blind admission system for his success, and that of his brother. He told the DNC that he thinks back on his classmates he left behind. “The difference wasn’t one of intelligence or drive, the difference was opportunity.” Similar ‘affirmative meritocracy’ schemes are run by Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth etc. Britain does have its rags-to-riches stories – but few of them involve clearing the hurdle of an Oxbridge entrance interview.

In theory, British universities should be more financially secure as they are funded by the government. In reality, the government is in crisis while philanthropy is booming. Stanford’s close connections with the real world help its fundraising.

Names are everywhere. It’s not the Engineering Building but the George Havas Engineering Building, etc. I even saw a coffee machine named after someone – joke (I think). Stanford’s campus is a shrine to philanthropy. New buildings seem to be going up everywhere thanks to the American government’s excellent tradition of offering cash breaks to those who give. The cash is converted into both academic excellence and social mobility – in a way that seldom happens with taxpayers’ money.

In Britain, universities are in relative decline. Only this week, a new study ranked us tenth in the world. Our academics are paid pitifully, which was bad enough in the Educating Rita days. But it’s now unsustainable in global marketplace. Let’s take two leading British academics whose names come up in Coffee House now and again: Niall Ferguson on the right and David Blanchflower on the left. They have both been snapped up by the Ivy League – at Harvard and Dartmouth College respectively, doubtless paid several times what they’d get here.

It’s a shame because Britain ends up with very few academics in public life. Our universities tend to hide their staff in ivory towers, encouraged by a government funding formula that rewards publications in academic journals. The US universities depend on donations, so they stay closer to the real world. This helps students, too. For British universities, the surest way to make extra cash is to accept higher-paying overseas students who now take 16pc of UK places, against 3pc of US places.

I was struck by just how much Stanford students studied, certainly not something I witnessed (or did) much at Glasgow. But just 4pc of applicants are admitted to Stanford, so I suspect they all feel pretty lucky. And it’s fairly easy to study if the libraries are as inviting as this one (below) and open until 1am. I also saw engineering workshops, with begoggled students still at it at midnight.

Oxford and Cambridge are facing ever-better competition from ever-richer global universities and will need to shape up. There has always been something nostalgic about our great universities, and their peculiar world of dining clubs, high tables and habit of mispronouncing basic words like ‘Magdalen.’ It is as if they salute the past because they’re uncomfortable about the future. And understandably, given their appalling levels of funding.

Their future facing all British universities is likely to involve deeper austerity and further government interference. The American private universities are enjoying the new golden age of philanthropy, expanding fast and poaching Brits. Their success demonstrates that private institutions (aided by donations) are capable of applying solutions to the social problems which have stumped governments. I wonder if there is any government in the world with a higher concentration of people who went to the same school as Britain. I’m not faulting the people who went to that school – you play the hand you’re dealt in life. But this suggests Britain can do better in tapping the potential of its young people. We need to ask: where are our Julian Castros?

The wealth of nations has never been more closely linked to the IQ of nations. Our universities are forced to compete in what David Cameron rightly refers to as a “global race.” Going independent may be their only way to stay in it.

There would be many students who cannot be able to go to college especially when the thing that they can only afford is the publicity of that school. I hope that this will not come true.

http://wrighteducationcentre.com/ Mikal

it is best education acdemic.

Poor

Have you been educated at the private American universities such as Harvard, Princeton or Yale? Most of the people coming out of these so called Ivy League schools are REAL IDIOTS. And to top it all of these shallow a*holes have a chip on their shoulders for no reason. I should know. I live, work and have been educated in the American propaganda system. I came to the U.S. as an international student from India and have regretted it for the last 22 years. Cambridge and Oxford actually STILL encourage critical thinking as opposed to blind liberal allegiance (and propaganda) to the police state like in the United States. If I had to do this all over again, I would most definitely attend university in Britain hands-down.

John Moss

All universities should be private. Government should simply provide vouchers to all 18 year olds worth £30,000 redeemable over five years to be spent on HE fees, or in-work training costs.

I suspect the figure will be higher now as universities are expected to discriminate against private school students.

Universities cannot be two diametrically opposing things at once. Either they are centres of excellence which requires a meritocracy to select the very best regardless, or they are centres for meeting political targets re selection by class. Inevitably UK universities must decline as centres of excellence in order to meet politically set class targets.

the viceroy’s gin

If you want to know what a private US college looks like, you may want to review Hillsdale College. It is a beacon of freedom and liberty, unique in all the Western world, beholden to none… and putting their money where their mouth is:

“Hillsdale’s educational mission rests upon two principles: academic
excellence and institutional independence. The College does not accept
federal or state taxpayer subsidies for any of its operations.”

And do read John O’Sullivan’s speech made at the dedication of that Thatcher statue:

Her new message is a kind of international Thatcherism. She believes
ordered liberty to be a better system than constructivist rationalism
for nations as well as for individuals. She believes in international
cooperation between sovereign nation-states rather than global
governance by transnational institutions. In particular, while urging a
warm relationship with continental Europe, she proposes that Britain
should regain and exercise its sovereign independence in a wider
commonwealth of English-speaking peoples.

These are controversial views. But they may also be prophetic. The
British people adapted with surprising speed and success to the
restoration of their economic liberties in the 1980s. Today they are
plainly uncomfortable in the bureaucratic structures of a Europe
constructed upon an alien political tradition. Freed from these stifling
political constraints, they might flourish independently yet again.

Sounds like Thatcher wanted out, not surprising given her love of freedom and liberty, the essence of Hillsdale’s tribute to her.

andagain

To quote from the Telegraph:

Britain was 10th overall – the same as last year – behind the US, Sweden,
Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia and
Singapore.

It came second in terms of “output” – measuring research and production of
graduates – but was named 24th in a separate “resources” table.

I always thought that you were supposed to maximise the output while minimising the input. But if the reverse idea is correct, Britain is really behind!

Abhay

I have a question.

Once you have applied private ownership principles to universities how would you prevent ‘Medieval theocrat Wahabi Sharia screaming enthusiast’ incorporated from acquiring them (thanks to their petrodollars)? And then running full-fledged courses on suicide attacks, FGM, stoning of women, killing infidels, smashing historical heritage (remember Bamiyan Buddhas) – the list goes on.

Not challenging, just gently asking.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

I suggest Fraser you go through the Pentagon Procurement List when you have a few days spare. In the list of Contractors you will find MIT, Harvard and no doubt CalTech, Stanford…….there are huge dollops of public money from the Defence Budget going into these “private” Universities which is how most US Subsidies work.

Oxford has nearly twice the Undergraduate population of Stanford and around the same Graduate Student population, though Stanford includes its B School in that. So it is quite a small College really.

It is worth noting that Harvard Business School has been known to extend loans to Harvard University to fund itself, and that Graduate Schools are/were Cash Cows.

In addition University Tuition in the USA has outpaced Incomes and GDP growth for at least 2 decades and is being fuelled by Taxpayer-Guaranteed Student Tuition lOans which now exceed $1 TRILLION with huge default levels. In 2013 (1) the only forms of Consumer Credit which increased were Student Loans and Car Loans. Student Loans now exceed Credit Card Debt.

2trueblue

Parents in the US start their childrens education funds when the child is 5yrs.!

http://www.facebook.com/gary.wintle1 Gary Wintle

Indeed the Pentagon Procurement list is a who’s who of welfare parasites, a bunch of “private contractors” who use the “revolving door” to ensure they get paid enormous amounts of taxpayer money. The amount of corruption and waste of taxpayer’s money in the US via the revolving door in the Pentagon and other corrupt bureaucracies is obscene.

Terry Field

To stay in the race, the whole country will have to go private. Otherwise it is all over, and the place will be as influential as it was under King John.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

They are selling defence policy to Saudi and Qatar, renaming the Mons Hall at Sandhurst after Bahrain so we can send troops to help kill Shia protestors on Saudi orders ….or was Hague proposing to arm them ?

MellorSJ

I read this article wondering why this was worth writing about. Every sentence was obvious.

Then I read the comments. Absolutely un***ingbelievable!

No wonder the UK is sinking into the ocean.

Mike Barnes

Interesting stuff, but do you really need to parrot Cameron’s god awful cliches about a ‘global race’?

We don’t have the population size or empire to ever ‘win’ and be top of the league again, so what’s our goal in this global race?

Avoiding relegation? What’s the score at the minute anyway? How do we know when we’ve won or lost? Who are we playing against and what do we need to do to win? How are you measuring wins anyway, do you win by jobs, growth, graduates? Eliminating relative poverty? Social justice and mobility? Equality and diversity?

Dave drops a buzzword in a speech and the press start using it immediately. Meanwhile the general public doesn’t have a clue what it means. We’ve been here before with ‘big society’.

After all, nowhere does social mobility like the good old US of A, where 97% of growth goes to the top 1 percent, right Fraser?

Colonel Mustard

It was the left wing who destroyed one of the greatest vehicles for social mobility in England – the grammar school – and then embarked on cultural/educational programmes, aided and abetted by the BBC, that ensured the model for the new comprehensives would be the “Please Sir” classrooms of the worst secondary moderns.

Left wing egalitarianism in Britain, as Mrs Thatcher warned, involves dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator and keeping them there by a process of taxpayer funded bribery and political oppression.

As for the tuition fees New Labour first introduced them and it hard to see, given how they are only repayable when a graduate earns a specific salary, how they have “excluded the vast majority from higher education”.

MichtyMe

Don’t rewrite history Colonel. It was not the left that did for the grammars, it was the Conservative Party. Why? because in the 50′s/60′s the expanding tory inclined middle classes were outraged when their kids were excluded and sent to the secondary moderns.

Colonel Mustard

Nice try but absolute 100%, Grade A tripe. You are the one re-writing history. Better acquaint yourself with Circular 10/65 aka the Crosland Circular.

Circular 10/65 was issued in 1965 under a Labour government by the Department of Education and Science (DES) requesting Local Education Authorities (LEAs) in England and Wales to convert their secondary schools to the comprehensive system. That effectively marked the abolition of grammar schools and the 11+ exam. Circular 10/65 was the initiative of Education Secretary Anthony Crosland (Labour) who memorably promised “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”. It was Labour government policy to replace the tripartite education system with comprehensive schools.

The Labour government made it mandatory for LEAs to convert. When Thatcher became Education Secretary she reversed this and made it optional. By then however most LEAs were too far down the road in their conversion plans, providing Labour revisionists ever since with that great dissembling trick of being able to say Thatcher abolished more grammar schools than Labour.

Fergus Pickering

Thank you, Colonel. I was not aware of all you just said. I half withdraw my charge of Tory cowardice.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

I tend to agree with you !

Fergus Pickering

No it wasn’t. Anthony Crosland introduced the policy to close every fucking grammar school in the land. It is true the Tories did not reverse it as they should have done.

Fergus Pickering

The vast majority? What percentage of school leavers go to a university? It was over 40% last time I looked. More than ever before. Whether it’s worth it is another thing entirely.

thanksdellingpole

You’re right but the one private sector Uni we have (BPP, a lawyer uni) was bought up by a US uni (Apollo) and now issues degrees of which are recognised here and in the US, so long as you pay the US uni the money.

Safeguards have to be in place so our Unis are NOT bought up by other countries, they must remain in our possession, this is the future of our country.

http://twitter.com/SRPercival Stephen Percival

The government’s intention to sell off the $62b student loan portfolio is a step in the direction for privatisation…so you might have this one in the bag, Fraser.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

I would sell it to RBS and then offer the Coop Bank to John Paulson. Ideally Citibank could invest some of the $2.5 TRILLION the Federal Reserve advanced them in secret loans in British Student Loans before the US Student Loans Portfolio goes bust

2trueblue

And yet Cambridge produced one person who invented the World Wide Web and gifted it to the world….. makes you proud to think that we are way ahead of the game in some areas.

JonFrum

Well then, there’s no need to change then, is there?

2trueblue

So?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Yes. There is a need to pump huge amounts of money into Engineering, Physics, Chemistry Departments in key institutions and boost R&D Spending

the viceroy’s gin

…and clear off the useless students and faculty involved with nonsense non-disciplines, or at minimum, make them pay their own way. The money currently being wasted on useless faculty and “educating” a new generation of trots and troughers is better spent on STEM and R&D.

2trueblue

What we need to change is the quality of degrees offered so that we are covered for the areas that actually add value for our needs for the future.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Tim Berners-Lee went to The Queen’s College, Oxford where he gained a First in Physics

2trueblue

Thank you for that, not concentrating.

Carlazi

tell you have been in california with your ‘wayyyyyyyyyyy better’ s

Fraser Nelson

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Why doesn’t Scotland charge proper tuition fees Fraser ?

15peter20

‘There has always been something nostalgic about our great universities, and their peculiar world of dining clubs, high tables and habit of mispronouncing basic words like ‘Magdalen.’ It is as if they salute the past because they’re uncomfortable about the future.’

Bit of a cheap shot. Cambridge, where they pronounce it ‘Magdalene’, is not really so backward-looking, is it? The big tech firms don’t think so. Granted, unlike Stanford, it doesn’t give lecture-hall space to towering intellects like Steve Hilton.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Lots of ritual in Japan, society is riddled with it and with hierarchy. It seems however to produce some excellent engineers and scientists, just as Cambridge does and Oxford does. Clearly Bill Gates thought enough to put a lot of money into Cambridge, and Sir David Robinson also

Austin Barry

I may be unlucky, but the two Stanford graduates with whom I’ve worked were terrifyingly bright but the most miserable, charmless blokes I’ve ever met.

JonFrum

Therefore?

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Usually they are fun, play good tennis, but lack the hard edge of East Coast Schools

Adrian Drummond

Crumbs… David Blanchflower snapped up by the Ivy League? Was this a misprint?

the viceroy’s gin

There are far more public universities in the US than private. The state universities are the backbone of post-secondary education (and research)… and much of the rest of the structure as well.

Stanford may be technically “private”, but the US federal government has pumped massive amounts of cash into that institution over the past 1/2 century and more. The “private” in terms of Stanford isn’t quite what you fantasize it is.

It’s wonderful that you Speccie teenagers are getting out in the world, and are fascinated by what you find. You do desperately need a proper education, afterall. But best not jump up on your hobby horse so soon after returning home.

BigAl

As usual, play the man not the ball. Good to see you lefties trying to stifle debate on yet another topic when you have no hope of convincingly winning the argument.

thanksdellingpole

How is he being leftie here, sure they US government is being leftie by doing this.

I’m pro-privatiation of universities, but he’s right that the US (at the top) likes to bend the rules.

the viceroy’s gin

I’m all for private universities as well, but the Speccie teenager is making a singularly uninformed argument for them. He’s doing more harm to the argument than good.

http://www.facebook.com/gary.wintle1 Gary Wintle

Many US corporations and other supposedly private institutions such as Universities are in fact subsidized by the taxpayer. In some cases, such as Lockheed Martin, they are effectively welfare spongers.
Let’s not forget the other spongers like Goldman Sachs, Blackwater, Monsanto, Johnson & Johnson, GE, who, like Lockheed, have bent the US taxpayer over and rammed hard and deep. Corporate Welfare is rampant in the US and is becoming rampant here.

Take a look at rail in this country, which is supposedly private, yet is more expensive and gobbles up more taxpayer money than it ever did in the days of British Rail. In fact British taxpayers and rail users are subsidizing Germany’s cheaper rail fares, while the French government owned EDF gouges Brits.
What people like Gove want is taxpayer’s money funneled into private companies; your money forcibly taken from you and given to his corporate chums.

MichtyMe

German Universities are to be found in the lower reaches of the global university ranking tables. That must explain their lack of economic success and general all round failure in Germany.

Adrian Drummond

Good point.

I’m aware of other European universities which would also be way down the rankings but are excellent.(and charge a fraction of the UK university fees, have their libraries open to 01.00 a.m. and with students studying). I sometimes think the UK has an inflated opinion of itself because it attracts so many overseas students. However, this probably has more to do with the fact that English is a global language and not Dutch nor Danish.

Fraser should cast his net wider to get a better view of matters.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

German Universities were destroyed when Hitler seized their endowments and their rebuilding came with Chancengleichheit whereby Equality triumphed over Elitism. They have excellent departments but no University or Alumni Culture as in Anglo-Saxon Universities

the viceroy’s gin

Interesting. So Shickelgruber eliminated the elitist, ivory tower university subculture? I would say that would be a welcome development in the US. The great maw of higher education cannot possibly ever be filled financially, and the elite running it have no intention of ever closing that maw.

And the average US university today has a nearly $500M endowment, meaning they are individually and collectively a power base unto themselves. That average includes “public” and “private” universities, which should serve to show that there is a definite blurring between these institutions in the US, and the Speccie teenager’s facile bleating about “private” in this blogpost is naive, poorly informed and badly misplaced. A few pretty pictures at Stanford don’t pass for sober thought and analysis, laddie.

MichtyMe

Yep, there is a big business opportunity here, millions from around the world are willing to pay big money to enter our universities, if only we would stop cluttering them up with cheap locals.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Already happened…40% PPE students at Oxford are foreign and no doubt that is replicated in lots of areas like Law and Engineering

Fergus Pickering

PPE, pretty poor economics, is what the thickoes do.

David Lindsay

What “global race”? Hardly anyone, especially as an undergraduate, goes to university abroad. Very few academics are employed outside their home countries at any given time, and most never are in their lives. This is just the nominally British Right’s constant cry that whatever they do “in America” must be adopted here, as if it were unarguable. What next, giving priority to “legacies” in the admissions process?

We’re talking about funding here, not culture. Money in a globalised world is different to anything of the past. What were are contemplating is the source of funding, not the influx of immigrants. Besides, even if we ere talking immigrants, it would be those of whom we actually want and if they were talented they’d leave soon after anyway, perfect.

What we are contemplating is a degree actually being worth the cost, that would stop the dummies from getting in and there’s nothing stopping our own from filling the places.

2trueblue

Well we have a new lot of real smart cookies within the EU using our funding to take degrees and then going home and not repaying their loans!
Globalised money has in fact not been such a great thing as it has contributed to the severity of the current recession.

thanksdellingpole

No, reckless people made the crisis, not “global” money.

2trueblue

Not just reckless, selfish, greedy.
Global in the sense that cross border deals in the financial arena enabled the movement of deals which did contribute to the crisis. This would not have happened if cross border deals had not been been facilitated in the ‘globalisation’ which was the the ‘great ‘ thing in the preceeding 12yrs.

thanksdellingpole

Let me make this absolutely clear: any financial crisis can be traced back to misjudgement, but when that system requires others to pick up the tab then, as a system, it is flawed.

Hence the need for savings and investments to be separated.

QED.

JonFrum

It’s the global race to educate your own students – the one that you’re losing. Do you have a Stanford, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology? These institutions are jobs and wealth creating machines. All of them fight with each other to recruit from low income communities. And as the article says, the less money you have, the more they give you.

If you’re too proud to learn from someone else, you’ll sink like a stone in the global economy.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Yes we do. We have IMPERIAL COLLEGE, London which ranks alongside MIT. We have Cambridge, UMIST. We have a huge Chemistry School at Oxford University and a High-Energy Physics Department linked to CERN and Hamburg and JET

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

You omit Harvard which is a real oversight since it has at least 3 of the top graduate schools

Poor

Yes WE have Harvard, a liberal propaganda elitist machine. Most of the students coming out of American universities are functional idiots. I live in the United States, I should know.

http://www.facebook.com/andrewparke4 Andrew Parke

My worry is that those who can afford to pay the full fees would be prioritised over those who would require subsidy, and then university education would be as unequal as secondary education in England is already.

Fraser Nelson

It’s a risk, but US universities have managed to adjust for it…

the viceroy’s gin

…US universities have done little but accept every applicant breathing, while skyrocketing tuition and fees charged. There is a soon-to-burst higher education bubble, which has been discussed for some years now, brought on by these practices.

JonFrum

Stanford accepts 4pc of applicants.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

So what ? It is a small University compared to UT or UC or UMass.

thanksdellingpole

This argument is duff. Look at the private school sector, compare it to the state.

QED

James

Could we win the global race if we had real politicians instead of self-serving-expense-fiddling-lying-corrupt-incompetent imbeciles?

James Strong

We’d be more likely to win the global race if we had no politicians at all.

I doubt if there are more than a handful of politicians in the world who are not ‘self-serving…etc.’

At best, politicians are worth our suspicion and scepticism, but most of the time they are worth our scorn and contempt.

thanksdellingpole

This is exactly the present problem: the reliance on centralised, inexperienced, non-guarantee-able, short term government people.

Privatisation is a guarantee of long term decision.

James

Our politians make long term binding privatisation agreements, but short term useless social ideologies.

2trueblue

And where will you find real politicians? Name a country?

James

England – Nigel Farage.

2trueblue

And what is his track record? Not yet proven.

James

Ed Miliband has no track record as a leader, but policy talks.

2trueblue

Millipede has no policies that actually talk so they are both out on a limb. Millipede also has form, 13yrs and look what he was involved in.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004981542519 Tom Tom

Putin

James

Putin does not tolerate foreign doctrines or Russian tax avoiders. I’ve got respect for his nationalism.